Last Wednesday, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas were voted into the baseball Hall of Fame. The process was accompanied by the usual controversy and soul-searching over how to handle players from the steroid era, what place advanced metrics should have in assessing players and whether leaving the decision solely to voters from the Baseball Writers' Association of America is somehow outdated.

On Monday, soccer will announce the winner of its biggest individual award, the FIFA Ballon d'Or. Barcelona's Lionel Messi, Bayern Munich's Franck Ribery and Real Madrid's Cristiano Ronaldo are the three finalists.

A bit like the Hall of Fame vote, the process will be subject to much debate. And when you look at it more closely, you realize that the Hall of Fame process is almost mathematical in its precision and accuracy relative to the way the FIFA vote is conducted.

Start with the criteria. The BBWAA stipulates that voting "shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played." FIFA is much looser: "The Awards are bestowed according to on-field performance and behaviour on and off the pitch."

Because FIFA's criteria are so vague, a number of myths—which become self-fulfilling over the years—have emerged. Such as the fact that a player needs to "win something" to merit consideration. This has never been an official criterion. It's just that, in the early years of the award, when it was run by the French magazine France Football and voted on exclusively by journalists, it inevitably ended up being that way.

Why? Because until 15 years ago games from around the world weren't continually streaming their way to a voter's TV, laptop or smartphone. Voters wouldn't have seen most players in person, except at Champions League finals or every other year at major tournaments or maybe the odd cup final or league decider.

But if you performed well in those few big games that garnered huge world-wide audiences and you were popular to boot, then you had a chance.

In 1988, Marco Van Basten was injured for half the calendar year but won the Ballon d'Or on the strength of being top goalscorer at the European Championship, with the eyes of the world upon him. It's not as if the voters didn't know that he had been hurt, it's just that "out of sight, out of mind" tended to apply. When they did see him, he was great.

Today, the dynamic has changed. The top dozen or so teams in the world are on TV every week in every corner of the globe. Unless you live in North Korea, odds are you could have watched just about every minute of Ronaldo's 2013 season.

The problem is that this oversupply of information hasn't necessarily made voters more informed. In part, there's the fact that just because you can watch all this soccer, doesn't mean you will or would want to.

This is especially true for the other two constituents who, since the Ballon d'Or merged with FIFA's own bauble in 2010, make up the electorate: national-team captains and national-team coaches.

While at first it may seem like a good idea to let coaches and players decide, what this effectively does is put the captain of, say, the Cook Islands on the same plane as the captain of England. And while the latter plays against the best in the world, week in, week out, the former watches them on TV, except when he himself is playing or training or, because many of the players for smaller nations are amateurs, working or studying.

It's the same argument for the national-team coaches of the many smaller nations who make up the majority of FIFA's membership. They are going to be mostly preoccupied with scouting players who are eligible for their teams and possibly their opponents, rather than preoccupying themselves with Ribery or Ronaldo.

Then there is the fact that, unlike baseball, there aren't too many statistical references to rely on. And those that do exist aren't of a uniform standard. In Major League Baseball, 30 home runs is 30 home runs, in soccer, 20 goals in the Dutch league does not equal 20 in the Premier League.

All these factors combine to yield a large section of the electorate that doesn't know and possibly doesn't really care about the award. This was reflected quite clearly when less than half the eligible Ballon d'Or voters bothered to take part in the ballot by the original deadline of November 15, forcing FIFA to extend it by another two weeks.

And that, if anything, is the biggest indictment of this award. When more than half the jury can't find the motivation to cast a vote, you wonder how seriously they are taking the whole exercise.

What you're left with is essentially a popularity contest, an Internet poll minus the multiple voting (you hope). Thankfully, in the past few seasons, it hasn't been a problem. Ronaldo and Messi have dominated voting since 2008 and, beyond personal preference, you couldn't really go wrong with either, as they are two of the greatest in history.

FIFA would love for the Ballon d'Or to be an even bigger deal than it is now. Maybe we'd have a Ballon d'Or museum one day, perhaps it can turn into an attraction like the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. But until it can give its awards process some more credibility—getting their own voters to actually care about it would be a good start—that won't happen.

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